For the past three days i changed my blog’s design to Lemon Twist which was created by Chris Murphy, and modified by him to suit the latest wordpress version. This 2.0 version doesnt have any widgets but it’s pretty easy to add such functionality to it.

The theme itself is a pretty great theme as it has jQuery installed and it does require some basic modifications to your wordpress. However, the theme is pretty fast and it’s very lightweight providing readers a great way to read your blog and stay in touch with you. It may look pretty complicated at first but once you get to know her, it’s great.

I did notice some basic things that the website doesnt have. First of all it’s not Valid XHTML. Second of all it doesnt have a login and/or admin panel, and so i decided to put one into it. I added a Login or Admin Panel into the blogmeta.php file which is displayed on the right. I did this by adding this into wp-content/themes/Lemon_Twist/includes/sidebar/blogmeta.php:

<?php global $user_ID; if( $user_ID ) : ?>
<?php if( current_user_can('level_10') ) : ?>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/">Admin Panel</a></li>
<?php else : ?>
<li><a href="/wp-login.php">Login</a></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

This displays Admin Panel with a link to the dashboard if the Admin is logged in. If the user/admin is not logged in it will display Login with a link to wp-login.php for easy access.

If you’re not used to adding such modifications to any theme, or you don’t know how, you can however download my blogmeta.php (405) and replace it with wp-content/themes/Lemon_Twist/includes/sidebar/blogmeta.php.

Have fun and hopefully that will get you started.